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A child reportedly rode through an X-ray baggage scanner last week at the Xiaolan Railway Station in South China. According to the state-owned China Global Television Network, the young'n snuck away from his father and hopped onto the conveyor belt. Apparently he is fine. As you'll recall, earlier this year a woman in Dongguan, China rode through an X-ray machine to keep an eye on her handbag.

What makes the iPad/iPhone app X is for X-Ray different is its ability to feed kids' curiosity. Every alphabetic object in X is for X-Ray, from an accordion to a zipper, has had its insides photographed by Hugh Turvey, Artist in Residence at the British Institute of Radiology. (Which sounds like an incredibly cool job, to begin with.)

As you read through the book, you can turn the X-ray vision on and off, rotate some of the images 360 degrees around, zoom in on other images, and even put on a pair of stereoscopic glasses to see things in 3D.

Unsurprisingly, this gimmick works better for some letters than others. A flower, for instance, doesn't make for the most exciting x-ray to look at. Nor does a piggy bank. But the internal combustion engine more than makes up for those brushes with mediocrity. If you put the engine photo in x-ray mode and rotate it, the image comes to life. Suddenly, you're not just looking at the insides of a piece of mechanical technology, you're watching them work—pistons pumping and cranks turning. It's really neat and strikingly beautiful.

My main complaint with the app is really a complaint with app development, in general: X is for X-Ray is only available for iPhone and iPad. Read the rest